The future has been examined.The past has been questioned.Now comes the difficult part.Living in the present.After everything that happened in TurtleGate and The Root of All Problems, life at Dragon Acres should finally be getting simpler.Gerald is still a turtle.The ancient dragon is still sleeping beneath the marsh.Toni would still prefer everyone use a little common sense.And Aria-the artificial intelligence created to help protect Dragon Acres-is becoming extraordinarily good at understanding what she can do.Unfortunately, that raises a much harder question: Who gave her permission to do it?As Dragon Acres confronts new questions about ownership, stewardship, protection, knowledge, technology, and responsibility, Dwayne and Aria begin to discover that some of the most important boundaries cannot be written into software.Capability is not authority.Protection is not control.Knowledge is not wisdom.And uncertainty is not permission.What begins at one unusual property in Indiana becomes a larger exploration of what it means to care for something without possessing it, protect someone without controlling them, and build a better future without sacrificing the people, places, creatures, and freedoms that make that future worth having.Gerald, meanwhile, remains unconvinced that civilization needed this much help in the first place.TurtleGate III: The Present brings the Dragon Acres trilogy home with the humor, philosophy, artificial intelligence, turtles, dragons, family, friendship, and wonderfully unnecessary complications that began with one very simple mistake.A turtle was mistaken for a dragonfly.Three books later, everyone is still dealing with the consequences.But beneath the absurdity lies the final question of the trilogy: We cannot change yesterday.We cannot control tomorrow.So what will we do with today?Funny, thoughtful, hopeful, and deeply human, TurtleGate III: The Present is a story about stewardship, restraint, freedom, responsibility, and learning that sometimes the wisest thing intelligence can do is know when to leave something alone.Welcome back to Dragon Acres.Gerald has been waiting.And he would like everyone to stop touching things.
